Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/32

xxviii tendency by loading or unloading the gold in our dollar, employing an index number of prices as the guide for such adjustments.

The process for doing this is as simple as clock-shifting for daylight-saving and would produce its effects as unobtrusively. Whether this or some other method be the particular one finally adopted for reaching the desired end, it is of the utmost importance, in the interests of justice to creditor and debtor, stockholder and bondholder, employer, employee, insurance beneficiary, savings bank depositor, trust foundations, public utilities, etc., that some method of stabilizing our monetary units shall be adopted as one of the fundamental measures of reconstruction, relating to the currency.

Otherwise we shall perpetuate a chief source of social injustice, discontent, violence, and Bolshevism. Only one real obstacle stands in our way—conservatism.

But to-day, as a result of the war, there is a new willingness to entertain new ideas. That is, the war has loosened the fetters of tradition. It was the French Revolution which led to the metric system. It would not be surprising if, as is being suggested, this war should give Great Britain a decimal system of money, revise the monetary units of the nations so that they shall be even multiples of the franc, give us an international money and stable pars of exchange and, as the greatest reform of all, as well as the simplest, give us a monetary system in which the units are actually units of value in exchange, as they ought, and were intended, to be.